At 21 years old, most people are finishing college coursework, not founding a healthcare company meant to serve patients across an entire continent. Justin Fulcher did exactly that in 2013, co-founding the telemedicine platform RingMD to connect patients in Asia with physicians who were often difficult to reach through traditional clinics and hospitals.
The problem RingMD set out to solve was straightforward to describe but hard to fix. Mobile phones had become common across much of Asia well before basic healthcare infrastructure caught up. Clinics were scarce in some regions, specialists scarcer still, and travel to reach them could take hours a patient with a limited income could not always spare.
Designing for Real Conditions
Fulcher and his team built RingMD around the technology patients actually had, rather than the technology a more developed market might assume. That meant building for spotty bandwidth, older devices, and connections that could drop mid conversation. “Healthcare is one of those things that affects everybody,” Fulcher told Charleston Digital Corridor in 2020. “Without the basic, fundamental healthcare access, it handicaps many parts of the world.”
The platform eventually operated in multiple countries, and by 2017 Fulcher’s work had earned him a spot on Forbes Asia’s 30 Under 30 list in the Healthcare and Science category, a recognition of both the company’s reach and the underlying engineering choices that made it usable in difficult conditions.
A Lasting Connection
Justin Fulcher stepped away from day to day management of RingMD in later years, but he never fully left. He continues to sit on the company’s board and holds a minority stake, even as his career has carried him toward very different institutional work. The lessons from those early years, building for constraint rather than convenience, would resurface later in a setting far removed from telemedicine: the acquisition offices of the U.S. Department of Defense. Refer to this article for additional information.
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